Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

And if the pleasurable is always the desirable, the desirable also may be said to be only the pleasurable. The martyr in his most eager desire for a painful death, fixes his mind, not upon the pain as pain, but upon the enduring it successfully, and the triumphant pleasure, also the satisfaction of the reward of martyrdom, and the pleasure of suffering for right and the approval of conscience; these and many other factors influence him.

Desire is at pleasure, not in pleasure, and thus contains pain, especially as implied in the preparative factors, sense of unreality and sense of lack. A bonbon may be so cunningly imitated, that placed in the mouth it feels like a bonbon, yet not tasting so, the painful sense of unreality and loss occurs. There is a painful waking up to the fact of non-realization, much the same in quality as that which we suppose to have happened in the original genesis of desire. The pleasant hallucination is broken in upon by actuality not fulfilling the psychic co-ordination pre-established under more favourable circumstances; and this occurs in early psychisms on a wider variety of occasions than in later development. That I am not tasting the bonbon I see on the table, this fact per se does not pain me. I take it as a matter of course in an order of nature already well learned and completely acquiesced in. But with infantile and lower stages of evolution generally, the lack of immediate correlation seems highly painful. Seeing has directly developed in immediate connection with a tasting, and the seeing without tasting seems by its very nature as disquieting as the feeling in the mouth the artificial bonbon without being able to taste is for later experience. It is through the negations of customary coincident impressions that anticipation and desire become forced by the exigencies of life. The early psychism is limited in its adjustments to a very few simple coincidences, but in the struggle of life in complex nature there comes disruption of these primitive co-ordinations, and sequences become apprehended, and meaning is discerned in things. This disruption primitively occurred most easily when there was direct opposition to the usual course of sensations. Just as when mouthing the imitation bonbon, we apprehend most quickly and easily non-realization when it tastes sour rather than sweet. By realities continually breaking in upon the common course of psychic association, the significance of things is gradually apprehended, and to see a thing is understood not merely as coincident with other sensations and perceptions, touching, tasting, and pleasure-feeling, but the thing is cognized as centre of pleasure potency, and so can become object of desire. Experience loses its self-contained simplicity, and is forced in the struggle of experience in a complex environment into some definite understanding of things, and into a feeling for them or at them, and not merely a feeling from them. And so a world of desirables and aversibles is formed.

If no pain was felt in the experience of unreality and lack, if there was mere passivity, desire would not be generated. This pain of loss spurs the mind to achieve desire, and desire enables the organism to attain the advantageous. At length a conventionalized world of desirables so formed, and certain significances, become so inground into experience that they seem often to be instinctively and immediately recognised by the individual, anterior to any personal learning by experience, as in cases of instinctive fear of, and desire for, certain objects.

While desire is attained at the incitement of pain, it is in itself a painful mental act. The emotional going out toward the desideratum is in itself a painful mode of consciousness. The feeling I have for the bonbon which I see and desire is, so far as desire, painful, yet negatively and comparatively, it may be pleasurable in that this psychosis may supplant one more painful still. It may be said that desire is painful, and also lack of desire, or ennui. But mere desirelessness is not ennui. Ennui is a feeling of lack and loss, and so a feeling of desire, but a peculiar kind of desire. It is desire for activity, when by a morbid status there is no desire moving to activity. Lack of desire and interest in things may be painfully revealed to some active natures, but to the great majority of psychisms it is a pleasure state. As far as we can judge, the undesire of the cow leisurely chewing her cud in a warm corner of the barn yard is supreme felicity. A state of desirelessness, complete yet blissful, occasionally visits even the consciousness of the nineteenth century busy-body. But the normality of desire for human adult consciousness in general is apparent to all. One who loses all interest or desire loses hold on life. Thus desire is life, and even when it is sought to extinguish it either as dictated by a philosophical maxim or by religious and moral scruples, on account of the innate selfishness of desire—Madame Guyon, for instance—yet desire is sure to intrude, and must as a desire to destroy desire. So whether we would fly, or would reach desire, we thereby desire. We may uproot or cultivate certain kinds of desire which thereby become objects of aversion or desire, but the effort to extinguish desire as general fact of psychic life involves either a psychological indefinite regressus which is never desireless, or else it means the extinction of consciousness itself in any grade above the lowest.

A further element which appears in all desire is some measure of self-consciousness. The representation of the experienceable implies some representation of experiences. In constituting the world as the sum total of the experienceable, we imply an ego-consciousness, and that objectifying as psychic act is correlated with subjectifying. Desire, like all other emotion, implies a subjective reference. We see clearly that the psychic act expressed by “this is the food,” and as such the precursor of and ingredient of desire, means an identification with past personal experience. A similar act is performed, no doubt, by animals very commonly, though not expressible in speech, yet in measure expressible, as in the cluckings of a hen to attract the brood to some seeds. In various ways the desideratum is suggested to the mind, and in view of it, both in the identifying as having experiences, and the longing to experience, some consciousness of personality is implied. This in early forms of psychosis is, no doubt, meagre and indefinite enough, but not more so than its correlate sense of object. When a strange object is presented, as when a famished traveller finds a new house, identifying effort is instinctive; he at once seeks to understand it, and gropes through his past experience to determine what has been its life significance for him or other persons, and so what will be. What is thus done in the full light of reflective consciousness by man, is done in a summary and imperfect manner, generally by psychisms, as preparative to making the object a desideratum or anti-desideratum. The assimilating and integrating, the knowing, never exists without some appreciation of subject, because integration is not only of something—objectifying act—but also to something—subjectifying act. Things are from the first apprehended only in their immediate egoistic significance, and also very early as centres of possible sensations which become a matter of fear and hope, desire and aversion.

Desire is certainly a very extensive psychic genus including many varieties which are noted by common introspection, and which are even denoted by special words. A wish is a momentary act of desire, longing is intense form; ambition and aspiration are desires for higher order of objects, as contrasted with desire for food or dress. The kinds as distinguished by object are numberless since any object may be desirable, and the realm of the desirable is coincident with the realm of the knowable. In the course of evolution we become aware of things and of states of consciousness, so that by feeling about them—having emotions—there may result the advantageous action with reference to them. This order, not consciously apprehended of course, is the natural order of psychic events, and one which, in tendency at least, always appears, even in latest evolutions. The desire to know what is the full experience value of things, curiosity, is an early acquirement, since complete cognition of object is obviously of the greatest advantage, especially to the weaker animals, as deer, who act wholly on the defensive. The very strong can afford to be largely indifferent to their environment.

With reference to intensity, we can place forms from a positive to a negative pole. Thus with a famished man desire for food is first intense craving, becoming with continued eating moderate desire, then feeling of satisfaction, then of repletion, then negative, as aversion in passive form or satiety, then becoming active as disgust, and intense as loathing. Content, or desire satisfied, is not desire extinguished, rather it is an equilibrium wherein desire and its function are in continual equalizing action. When desire granted means all desire extinguished, with beings of any high tendency to activity ennui is the result. Here, as Schopenhauer notes, wish for a wish develops. Even in complete pleasurable quiescence, there is desire for its continuance, which is only saying that there can be no complete quiescence short of coma, or else of a state where reality has never broken in, and experience is wholly unformed where the being cannot anticipate or note change. Pure and absolute content never occurs, and as a matter of fact never will, the point of transition in the desire gamut, in passing from positive to negative, being like a mathematical form, unreal and theoretical. When positive desire ends, negative desire springs up immediately, just as in the pleasure-pain gamut, where the indifference point of transition has no existence in reality.

Desire in any of its forms may take on an altruistic, disinterested phase, though much that is taken for altruistic is only apparently or partially so, being really due to self-extension. If you take an interest in anything, it becomes interesting to you, it is a matter of personal concern, and becomes identified with the self. Thus in our family, our town, our nation, our race, desire plants itself; it is in this personal extension of view that most of the pity, sympathy, and benevolence is exercised. A well-wishing and consequent exertion for humanity in general is very late, and still later is desire for animals as sentient beings having a worth of being in themselves.

The remarks we have made concerning desire proper, apply equally to aversion. We must bear constantly in mind that desire proper and aversion are really in psychic analysis, merely phases positive and negative of a certain definite mode of psychosis, hence we often use desire in this large and generic sense, which instances will be apparent from the context. Desire, like other emotions, is polar, and desire generic has its antipodal feeling in some form of active desirelessness.

As desire is naturally and originally connected with all perception of object, we find it closely allied with other emotions. While we must suppose that early desire is upon idea of pleasure, upon the idea of its realization to be attained, without any estimate of likelihood or unlikelihood of realization, which factor is slow in evolution, yet when through experience, sense of certainty or uncertainty is attained as to the experienceable, this psychosis—belief—has a marked effect upon desire, and is closely associated with it. Bare sense of the experienceable was sufficient to generate desire, but when the measure of probability of the experienceable actually happening is measured, we have belief, expectation, hope, and kindred psychoses, bound up with desire. The expression, “I hope it will be a good day to-morrow,” indicates a wish that it would, plus some confidence that it will be a good day; “I wish it would be a good day, but I fear it will not,” shows some lack of confidence in the realization of the event. Hope then equals wish, plus the intellectual element expectation, a desire for a realization plus some belief in it as actually to happen. A large share of learning by experience consists in the reaction of this expectation on the wish, in learning not to set our hearts on what we believe to be unrealizable or extremely improbable to happen. Wish also acts on belief, as is plainly expressed in the common phrase, “the wish is father to the thought.” If belief tends to restrict or magnify desire, desire also tends to determine belief. Hope, as very commonly used, as when we say, “I hope it will turn out so,” is a passive emotion, and does not appeal to the individual as self-determining the event. As the primary end of emotion is to incite the organism to determine its own experience, hope as passive seems a rather late evolution, as having only an indirect and general value by maintaining general pleasurable tone. The one who hopes it will be a good day to-morrow is in a better and more advantageous frame of mind than he who fears it will be a bad day, in so far as the events are equally beyond self-determination, and it is of no direct use to either hope or fear.